Month: March 2008

It’s Out There

by digby

McCain has “suspended” a staffer for circulating a nasty video about Senator Obama. He says there is no tolerance for such behavior in his campaign and he will fire anyone who does it. He is so adamant about it that he alerted the media and told them all about it. And the media dutifully reported McCain’s fine decision, citing his commitment to running a clean campaign and disowning of this horrible video — and then they showed the name and URL on the Youtube site, just in case anyone needed to see the scurrilous video over which the good man McCain so righteously suspended his campaign staffer.

I’m sure that staffer will be amply rewarded for taking the bullet to get that video “out there.” That was, after all, the point.

Update: D-Day has more on his blog (which you all should have on your bookmarks!)

Update II: I can’t tell if this is a parody or not. I think it must be. Nobody actually believes McCain is above this stuff, do they? He’s the meanest man in the Senate.

.

Federal Agency As Campaign Outreach Arm

by dday

During elections as far back as 2002, Karl Rove made sure that all political resources at his disposal were employed to help elect Republicans. Federal agencies you would think had scant ability to impact an electoral debate suddenly had deputies all over swing districts, making official announcements and giving federal largesse in areas with threatened Republican members of Congress. This is of course illegal, but it didn’t stop Rove from holding meetings with agency heads and briefing them on which Republicans needed help and how they could deploy that help. Here’s an article that lays this out.

Thirteen months before President Bush was reelected, chief strategist Karl Rove summoned political appointees from around the government to the Old Executive Office Building. The subject of the Oct. 1, 2003, meeting was “asset deployment,” and the message was clear:

The staging of official announcements, high-visibility trips and declarations of federal grants had to be carefully coordinated with the White House political affairs office to ensure the maximum promotion of Bush’s reelection agenda and the Republicans in Congress who supported him, according to documents and some of those involved in the effort.

“The White House determines which members need visits,” said an internal e-mail about the previously undisclosed Rove “deployment” team, “and where we need to be strategically placing our assets.” […]

Under Rove’s direction, this highly coordinated effort to leverage the government for political marketing started as soon as Bush took office in 2001 and continued through last year’s congressional elections, when it played out in its most quintessential form in the coastal Connecticut district of Rep. Christopher Shays, an endangered Republican incumbent. Seven times, senior administration officials visited Shays’s district in the six months before the election — once for an announcement as minor as a single $23 government weather alert radio presented to an elementary school. On Election Day, Shays was the only Republican House member in New England to survive the Democratic victory.

“He didn’t do these things half-baked. It was total commitment,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), who in 2002 ran the House Republicans’ successful reelection campaign in close coordination with Rove. “We knew history was against us, and he helped coordinate all of the accoutrements of the executive branch to help with the campaign, within the legal limits.”

Rove may be gone, but this practice continues.

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was in Minnesota on Tuesday to announce a proposed pilot project for the federal No Child Left Behind law that would give 10 states more flexibility in addressing struggling schools’ specific needs….

However, Minnesota doesn’t yet have enough of those schools to participate in the pilot project, prompting some to question why Spellings made the announcement here and whether it was an effort to help Sen. Norm Coleman in his reelection campaign.

Spellings appeared at the state Department of Revenue and the State Capitol alongside Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Coleman.

“It certainly smells that no Democrats were invited to this event, when we already know that this administration has politicized Cabinet agencies,” said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “It looks like a stunt to help Norm Coleman’s campaign.”

It more than “looks like” a stunt, that’s exactly what it is.

.

The War Economy

by dday

In his third major speech in three days, Barack Obama tackled the war’s impact on the economy.

“Instead of fighting this war, we could be fighting for the people of West Virginia,” Senator Obama said today. “For what folks in this state have been spending on the Iraq war, we could be giving health care to nearly 450,000 of your neighbors, hiring nearly 30,000 new elementary school teachers, and making college more affordable for over 300,000 students. We could be fighting to put the American dream within reach for every American – by giving tax breaks to working families, offering relief to struggling homeowners, reversing President Bush’s cuts to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and protecting Social Security today, tomorrow, and forever. That’s what we could be doing instead of fighting this war.”

Now, this is something of an oversimplification. In a direct sense, the war in Iraq is propping up the economy, because it’s adding manufacturing jobs in the defense sector. But those aren’t the jobs we should be adding because they’re not sustainable. What I’d like to see progressives do is carry this critique forward. People in this country overwhelmingly believe that Iraq spending hurts the economy, so we’re already halfway there.

What hurts the economy is unnecessary DEFENSE spending in general; wars are started from time to time to justify that spending. The defense budget is a sacred cow that generations have considered off-limits in a bipartisan fashion. John McCain’s mavericky charge against “wasteful spending” meets the water’s edge at the defense budget. To Republicans and many Democrats, the defense budget is a magical portion of the ledger where more and more money can be stashed without harming the overall fiscal structure of the country.

If you want to call it the Iraq recession, fine; people are going to believe that, since they hate Bush, hate our involvement in Iraq, and think that Bush is clueless on the economy. But I hope that this goes the next step – talking about our unbalanced economy in general, with tens if not hundreds of billions squandered on contracting abuse and outdated weapons systems. This could be a real point of contrast with “More Wars” McCain. If we can get a mandate to look seriously at the military-industrial complex we’ve gone a long way. It’s not going to be easily; defense manufacturing and jobs are cleverly spread throughout the country so that practically every member of Congress has a stake in keeping the budget dollars flowing to their districts (and having the campaign contribution dollars flowed back to them). But if we have this much of a mandate to change that transaction – 71% in that poll – we ought to take it.

.

Like Who Cares?

by tristero

This post grossly distorts what was going on in the media “on the eve of war.” Greg Mitchell is correct that the NY Times, for example, editorialized against the war. But it was carefully timed to be too late to have any effect.

Besides, who cares what newspapers’ editorial boards think anymore? The action’s on this new fangled contraption called “Television.” Now, on “Television” – sometimes abbreviated “TV” and pronounced “Tee Vee” – the networks made numerous timpanists and double-bassists extremely wealthy by commissioning ominous music for their On The Brink of War specials. Journalists who should have known better were signing up for embedding with an enthusiasm that was, to be extraordinarily polite about it, unseemly given the blatant way Rumsfeld et al were crowing about this plan to co-opt press coverage.

Greg Mitchell is right: media coverage of efforts to start this insane war was complex. Doctoral theses will be written about nuances like the editorial opposition to the war. But there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind five years later that both the coverage and the attitude of the press towards the Bush administration in 2002/03 was disgracefully craven. To focus on a minor detail while making only a half-hearted attempt to put it into the entire context of the media blitz reads like a move to let the press off the hook. After once again seeing the pictures that emerged from Abu Ghraib of an American soldier giving the thumbs up over the corpse of a murdered prisoner, I’m not inclined to be so generous.

Remember: this was a time when no one who cared about his or her career would dare speak out against the war and when some very astute observers were bamboozled. In the blogosphere, Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, and Kevin Drum were among them Public opposition to the war was lukewarm at best among anyone who had access to the mainstream press. Including the editorialists.

Acceptable vs. Unacceptable

by dday

When you read this story, you have to play back in your mind the vision of Brian Ross getting the release of Hillary Clinton’s personal First Lady schedule, flipping through his heavily dog-eared copy of the Starr Report, and studiously matching up dates. All the while approving the clip art of the semen-stained dress and Lewinsky, making sure it all fit in the frame, etc.

You could bust a guy for sexual deviancy just for the work it took to produce this swill.

Hillary Was in White House on “Stained Blue Dress” Day

Schedules Reviewed by ABC Show Hillary May Have Been in the White House When the Fateful Act Was Committed

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives….

The public schedule for Sen. Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, the day on which Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress would become stained by the president, shows the first lady spent the morning and the night in the White House….

This is somehow a perfectly acceptable news item, possibly even acceptable enough for a broadcast story too. And yet coffins of American bodies coming home from an unnecessary war based on deception is too “offensive” for tender eyes.

I’ll give you another example. Bill Maher said this about McCain on Hardball today:

you know, we are one terrorist attack away from john mccain i’m sure rising in the polls by ten points. because people think, oh, yeah, he is tougher. he is not tougher about the war. he’s dumber about the war. he’s dumb about the war because he thinks by keeping troops in the heart of the muslim world that’s going to help the war on terror. that’s exactly what started the war on terror. that’s why bin laden was so angry at the u.s. because we had tloops in saudi arabia. we pulled them out after 9/11, by the way. of course we go right back in and plant them in the heart of the muslim world and build pizza huts. that is why young muslim men want to come here and blow themselves up and kill us. it is not about what happens in iraq. we need to get out of iraq not build bases there.

This is very true. But what of course is so ridiculous is that this is one of the quotes that, when broadly defined, got Rev. Wright in trouble. When it comes down to it, there’s not much daylight between “We caused 9/11” and “bin Laden was angry at us about having bases in Saudi Arabia.” I think Maher’s analysis is correct, but it shouldn’t be lost that he’s allowed to say it.

The larger point about all this is how conservatives and in particular the media define acceptable discourse, and what will provoke outrage, or barely a twitter. When Janet Jackson shows a covered nipple, the world comes to an end. I saw about 20 minutes of Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute’s Girls Gone Wild video, played on an endless loop in the middle of the day today, and then we have this really putrid Brian Ross “investigative news article” literally peeping into someone else’s bedroom. When Christian conservatives rewrite the words to “God Bless America” and sing it in front of Republican Presidential candidates, nobody in the media considers that to be a “problem” for the GOP because white religious nuts are SUPPOSED to be crazy, and therefore accepted. Black religious figures, on the other hand, when they step outside the bounds as defined in the media by, I don’t know, “Sister Act,” represent a threat to the Republic.

Now, Janet Folger, who put together that Values Voter Presidential Debate, where “Why should God Bless America” was sung from the stage, has endorsed John McCain. It’s as easy to make the guilt-by-association argument with respect to him as it has been to Obama or Clinton’s litany of associates. But nobody does.

This is about defining the discourse. And if it hurts Democrats, or anyone who seeks to challenge the status quo, for the most part the videotape rolls. If not it gets locked up. Funny how that works.

.

Public Enemy #1

by dday

So Osama bin Laden is so concerned about Bush’s war on terror and that relentless hunt for him that he has time to take a look at European cartoons and make value judgments on them.

Good thing he’s on the run. I’m sure we’ll smoke him out of his hole any day now.

.

Nervous Much?

by dday

I think that the noise machine is a little worried about this McCain useful fiction about Iran and Al Qaeda. Some Weekly Standard propagandists crashed a conference call with the National Security Network, trying to take the bullet for McCain’s lies. The insaneosphere thinks McCain was only wrong by backing down on the “obvious” Iran-Al Qaeda connections. I heard Joe Scarborough try to defend McCain on the basis that he was tired, and smugly mused that such a line of argument won’t push white voters in Missouri away from him in November.

I’m not sure why they’re so worried about it. The media types who would supposedly hold this over McCain’s head are so ignorant themselves about geopolitics that they’ll blurt out the same mistakes without thinking.

Certainly we know the GOP’s playbook for November: throw up more lies and obfuscations about scary furriners while running an explicitly racial campaign designed to frighten everyday people about the opponent (and if Hillary pulls this out, it’ll be an explicitly sexist campaign). I really don’t see why the media will throw up a roadblock against that. They don’t have a whole lot more knowledge about the world than John McCain does; and they prefer to “cover the controversy” rather than referee it. The press has done little more than amplify these lies over the last several years. And the GOP manages that by yelling and screaming a lot and muddying the waters, so maybe that’s all that’s going on here.

Maybe the GOP understands that the public has turned against the war and the Republican brand, distrust the media (see the Tweety Effect), and will find alternative means to make their decisions about the next President and who will lead the Congress. McCain looked like either a devious warmonger or a fool today, and the war machine has already cried wolf on this one. The parallels to the Cheney Administration are undeniable, with all the weasel words and carefully selected language designed to conflate and confuse and muddle. The danger here is not a media hit; it’s that people will recognize the singularity of McSame.

UPDATE: By the way, I think what Digby noted last week about the power of repetition and how it tricks us certainly applies here. Not just about Iran/Iraq/Al Qaeda conflation, but the idea that McCain is so knowledgeable about foreign policy and couldn’t possibly make a mistake of such magnitude. It’s extremely difficult to combat.

.

Not A Misstatement

by dday

I’ve been watching a bit of MSNBC this morning, which is the modern equivalent of medieval self-flagellation. And they’re touching on this John McCain story, but treading lightly. Just to re-set the scene, yesterday McCain at a news conference said that it’s “common knowldege” that Al Qaeda extremists, who are Sunni fundamentalists, are being trained in Iran, a Shiite theocracy. According to MSNBC, McCain “misspoke” and was quickly corrected by his pal Joe Lieberman, and talking heads have told me that it’s really strange because McCain knows the issues so well. They’re tellingly not showing the actual tape a whole lot, but they’re assuring everyone that it was just a simple misstatement. Ari Melber of The Nation tried to set the record straight but was quickly shouted over. Then the pool reporter repeated reported McCain’s spin that it would be “ludicrous” to suggest that he didn’t know the difference between the two groups.

Now, this was no “misstatement.” It was a lie that McCain has repeated over and over again. In fact, he repeated it again today.

For the third time in two days, the Arizona Republican has pushed the definitively false statement that the terrorist group Al-Qaeda was getting assistance from Iran, even though he was publicly ridiculed for the same false assertion on Tuesday.

This time, in a statement from his campaign honoring the fifth year anniversary of the war, McCain wrote:

“Today in Iraq, America and our allies stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism. The security gains over the past year have been dramatic and undeniable. Al Qaeda and Shia extremists — with support from external powers such as Iran — are on the run but not defeated.”

This is a real careful statement, putting Al Qaeda and Iran in the same sentence but with enough weasel words to claim that he’s not saying what he’s actually saying.

Now, I’m not real big on the hypothetical converse argument – as in “If Hillary Clinton said this there would be a firestorm” – but it’s factually true. The BBQ-stained media is covering for McCain, playing down the remarks, and actually making statements like this:

NBC News political director Chuck Todd observed, “[H]ad Clinton or Obama done something like this, this would have been played on a loop, over and over.”

Yeah, I know! Good thing you aren’t doing something so silly!

In this case, it would be completely warranted. McCain is vigorously attached to the current Iraq policy and willing only to look at the short term at the expense of an overall strategy which takes into account America’s foreign policy interests. In the short term, equating enemies and scaring the public is in his best interest. It plays into his stupid and shortsighted sense of “honor” that stipulates we can never leave Iraq. Furthermore, McCain is at the least belligerent toward Iran, and it serves his interests to believe they are in league with Al Qaeda. Whether McCain is confused, believes what he wants to believe, or is actually deviously conflating various enemies to create a sense of the “Other” is immaterial. The consequence is the same; more intractable conflicts and a catastrophic foreign policy. As Ilan Goldenberg says:

Here’s the thing about McCain’s mistake (and let’s be clear it was a mistake he repeated it three times in one day. It’s a mistake and a lack of understanding). This is a man who has staked his ENTIRE CAMPAIGN ON IRAQ.

This is a man who thinks it’s OK for us to leave a troop presence in Iraq for 100 years. He thinks that Iraq is the central struggle of our day. He thinks that all of our other interests should be subverted to sticking it out in Iraq. He is running on his foreign policy experience. Yet he doesn’t even understand who we are fighting. Is this the person we want answering the phone at 3 in the morning? This fundamental misunderstanding makes you wonder if he is qualified to be commander and chief. It’s quite frankly stunning.

I know that McCain’s a mavericky maverick and he’s supposed to pick up this stuff by osmosis, but clearly we have another Republican candidate who is unconcerned with facts.

Now, Barack Obama actually hit McCain on this today, saying this:

Just yesterday, we heard Senator McCain confuse Sunni and Shiite, Iran and al Qaeda. Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no al Qaeda ties. Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades.

He also rightly said that last year McCain was arguing we can’t leave Iraq because violence was going up, and now we can’t leave Iraq because violence is going down (except it’s going back up now). He and Hillary Clinton have to keep saying this – and force the conversation on McCain’s foreign policy cluelessness generally and his lack of command of details in particular.

.

Spin Cycle

by dday

It’s illuminating to see, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, what the architects of this nightmare have to say about it in their inevitable soundbites.

George W. Bush:

Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision and this is a fight America can and must win … The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable … No one would argue that this war has not come at a high cost in lives and treasure — but those costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq.

The costs are especially necessary because they haven’t caused him any problems, money, worry… that must be why it seems so romantic to him – actions without consequences usually do.

Here’s liberal hawk Kenneth Pollack:

“Certainly the first four years were about as disastrous as I could possibly imagine. Actually, they were more disastrous than I could have imagined. I am hard-pressed to find a single major decision where the U.S. didn’t make the worst possible choice …. Thirty years from now, when historians look back, where are they going to come out? If at the end of the day the U.S. screwed things up for four years and then in the end left Iraq a better place than they found it under Saddam, it may have still been worth it.”

Yes, I’m sure Pollack actually spoke out between 2003-2006 about the mistakes and disasters… oh wait:

Iraq, however, may not be doomed to the same fate. For one thing, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and his government are far more popular and better-intentioned than President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and his kleptocratic colleagues ever were. And, because the Iraqi insurgents are as happy to blow up Iraqi civilians as American convoys, they do not enjoy the broad appeal of the Vietcong (let alone the firepower of the North Vietnamese Army).

Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle:

There are lots of problems and after thirty years of a brutal dictatorship, we can’t turn this thing around overnight. But to say we cannot win.

See, thirty years of dictatorship means that you need THIRTY YEARS OF WAR to set things right.

Here’s the Iraqi leaders themselves, at their national reconciliation conference:

Oh yeah, they didn’t show up. Multiple political blocs and tribal leaders boycotted the conference.

And what would a retrospective be without our pal Fourthbranch:

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Fitting.

.

Enter Fourthbranch

by dday

As we reach the fifth anniversary of the beginning of an unnecessary, pre-emptive, disastrous war with far-reaching consequences for Iraqis, Americans, and the whole globe, Dick Cheney has taken control of the effort to make sure this catastrophe lasts 100 years longer or more.

Vice President Dick Cheney played the part of backroom power broker for two days and came away on Tuesday with pledges from Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to firm up a new blueprint for U.S.-Iraq relations that will stretch beyond the Bush presidency.

Cheney flew in a cargo plane to Iraqi Kurdistan in the north to finish two days of private meetings with powerful politicians in Iraq. On Monday, he had talks with officials in Baghdad — even venturing outside the secured Green Zone to dine and have private discussions.

Topics ranged from security in Iraq to Iran’s rising influence in Mideast, but a key item was about crafting a long-term agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, plus a narrower deal to define the legal basis for continued U.S. troop presence.

The deal would take the place of a U.N. Security Council resolution that expires in December, the same time Bush will be packing up to leave office. The administration says the deal will not seek permanent U.S. bases in Iraq or codify troop levels, nor tie the hands of a future commander in chief as some Democrats fear.

Not at all, there doesn’t seem any reason to fear that such an agreement “will stretch beyond the Bush presidency,” despite that being its essential goal.

Cheney – last seen continuing to push a discredited link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and citing as proof the work of Stephen Hayes, who in turn cites as proof the work of… Cheney – has always been interested in a longer game in Iraq. He’s never had much use for the normal rules, and so ignoring Congressional approval of a treaty that will go far beyond a normal status of forces agreement is par for the course.

But the real purpose of this trip is a kind of whistle-stop tour for John McCain and keeping the White House in imperialist hands.

Read today’s comments by Iraq’s foreign minister about the perils of a too-sudden American withdrawal, and take into account that he said these things a day after Vice President Cheney and John McCain visited with him. After reading his comments and their timing, it isn’t far-fetched to assume the following:

1. His message was written and coordinated with McCain and the White House; and
2. The Iraqi government is now an active agent in support of the McCain candidacy.

It’s a little galling to see the Iraqi regime plead with us to continue the sacrifice of our soldiers, military readiness, and treasury when they are sitting upon billions of their own unspent oil monies, and still fail to move towards the necessary political reconciliation that would make our withdrawal possible. But Democrats need to realize that the al-Maliki government will be actively supporting the White House and McCain message to stay the course, and wants John McCain elected to ensure this and continue their existing free ride and graft.

So, Fourthbranch rides into Iraq for a surprise visit to negotiate a deal that would ensure continued protection and enrichment of the Shiite theocracy that is the Iraqi government. In return they don’t have to give up the oil money they’re hording or allow Sunnis into the government or the security forces or meet benchmarks or anything – they just have to say quietly and with much solemnity that troop withdrawals will lead to chaos. It’s somehow perfectly aligned with McCain’s message, oddly enough, as well as keeping in concert with the permanent Middle Eastern presence Fourthbranch has envisioned for over a decade.

One can only imagine the riches he promised the propped-up regional leaders in return for their parroting his message. It’s worth noting that the Iraqis most often heard in the US media – in fact, the only Iraqis – have a powerful incentive for the US to stay, if only for their own self-preservation. Here’s Marc Lynch in a must-read think piece about withdrawal:

The current government, and more broadly the Green Zone political class, is one of the few Iraqi groupings which genuinely wants or needs a sustained American presence – as the guarantor of its political survival. At the same time, they have been one of the greatest obstacles to national reconciliation, and have proved largely resistant to American pressure. Since surviving a series of attempts to unseat his government, Maliki seems to feel politically secure and has spoken often about his belief that national reconciliation has already been achieved. Support for relatively unconditional American backing is similarly strong among the Green Zone Kurdish leadership. Even the Green Zone Sunnis, who have often been the most critical of the US in public and have long since quit the Maliki government, need the Americans to maintain their political positions.

The Green Zone dominant parties share a common situation, of disproportionate power in the national government and an eroding position within their own constituencies. The Sunni parties feel threatened by the rise of the Anbar Salvation Council and the Awakenings, and by their failure to achieve substantial national reconciliation legislation to strengthen their political hand with their constituency. The united Shia list of the UIA has long-since fragmented, with the Sadrists and Fadhila and other Shia parties now largely on the outside. By most reports, ISCI has lost ground with Shia voters, and would likely lose in elections (provincial or national). ISCI’s political leadership therefore depends on US support for its political weight, and despite its strong Iranian ties would likely be loathe to see the US leave. The Supreme Council’s response to a withdrawal would be clearly shaped by its terms, and by the role – implicit or explicit – of Iran in the presumed post-US order. At the same time, in the context of an agreement (tacit or overt) with Iran, its role could be guaranteed. Without such a guarantee, however, the incentives would be strong to unleash the Badr Brigades to stir up trouble in hopes of preventing the US from following through on its plans to depart.

No Iraqi actor would scream more loudly or offer more dire warnings of impending doom than the current Green Zone elite – and, not coincidentally, these are the voices most often heard in Washington and by politicians on short visits to Baghdad. But their warnings should be understood at least in part as expressions of their own political self-interest. No Iraqi actor is more likely to quickly readjust its behavior and calculations should such a withdrawal be announced. With the US set to depart, the whole range of national reconciliation initiatives which are currently seen as at best luxuries and at worst mortal threats would suddenly become a much more intense matter of self-interest. The integration of the Sunni Awakenings, for instance, would move from a challenge to Shia hegemony over the security forces into the best possible way to pre-empt their military challenge. The credible commitment to withdrawal would give the US much-needed leverage over the Green Zone leadership.

It’s like a parallel Village. And Cheney knows just how to placate them.

.